Tuesday, December 17, 2024

The University of Waterloo was recognized in the Global University Visibility rankings as the 5th most visible university among its Canadian peers. 

The Global University Visibility rankings are developed by American Caldwell, a higher education market research firm headquartered in Washington, DC. They measured how effectively a university communicates its story to the world using performance indicators such as news coverage, Google searches, website traffic and social media followers. 

“Waterloo has a unique story to share. We have the largest co-op program at a research-intensive university in the world, and we consistently rank number one among Canadian universities for producing the most successful entrepreneurs,” says Eleanor McMahon, vice-president of University Relations. “Telling our story — showing the world what makes Waterloo unique — is an important priority for the University in building strong global partnerships and recruiting the next generation of students.”

A universities’ brand name and recognition are an essential part of prospective students’ post-secondary search process, according to American Caldwell. Some notable statistics that put Waterloo at the top compared to other Canadian universities are:

• #4 most popular website with 7.1 million visitors
• #5 largest social media following with nearly 700,000 followers
• #5 news coverage with more than 8,500 news mentions

Overall, Waterloo ranks 64th globally for brand visibility, putting it in the top 10 per cent of universities. Waterloo’s visibility is attributed to the research breakthroughs, innovations and successes of its accomplished alumni, students and faculty. This ranking helps to quantify how their impact as part of the Waterloo community is seen around the world.

“Waterloo is known as a leading global research-intensive university that prioritizes co-op, and entrepreneurship programming. This attracts and inspires curious students and scholars who want to innovate and push the boundaries of what’s possible. We want them to come and discover their story at Waterloo,” McMahon says.

Data were collected from March 2023 to March 2024. Visit the Global University Visibility rankings to see the complete global list.

Celebrating November and December’s retirees

Human Resources has reported the following employees have retired in November and December 2024:

November 2024

• Kathy Winter, who joined the University in October 2000, retired as Privacy Officer and Assistant University Secretary in the Legal Counsel department;
• Professor Moira Glerum, who started at Waterloo in July 2011, retired as regular faculty member in the Biology department;
• Gabriel Moreira, who began working at the University in September 1978, retired as Personnel Truck Driver in Plant Operations; and
• Gary Goetz, who started at Waterloo in February 2003, retired as Electrician in Plant Operations.

December 2024

• Nancy Oldford, who joined the University in February 2016, retired as Research Training and Compliance Officer in the Office of Research; and
• Lorraine Craig, who started at Waterloo in August 2012, retired as Research Associate in the Psychology department.

Congratulations all on your much-deserved retirements!

Wrapping up the University Holiday Gift Drive

The University Holiday Gift Drive was a resounding success this year, judging by the piles of gift-wrapped boxes in the Tatham Centre.

“This year, thanks to your contributions, we were able to sponsor everyone on our list,” writes Abigail Wybenga, who helped coordinate the initiative, in an email to toy drive participants. “That’s over 300 families and 525 children – over 100 more than last year! The Tatham Centre was absolutely bursting with toys and gifts.”

In a tradition dating back to the 1980s, Co-operative and Experiential Education has partnered with Region of Waterloo Home Child Care, with staff sponsoring children from working low-income families and donating gifts on their wish lists. Gifts were collected and dropped off at the Tatham Centre earlier this month and are ready to be packed into Santa’s sleigh for delivery.

 “We would also like to say a huge thank you to our volunteers who worked tirelessly to help us collect and organize the gifts on both drop off and pick up days. Your time, effort, and dedication really helped us to make sure everything ran smoothly, and we couldn’t have done it without you.”

Security researchers honoured with 2024 Best Portuguese Internet Research Award

Diogo Barradas is an Assistant Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, a member of the CrySP group, and the interim Associate Director of the Waterloo Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute. His research focuses on network security and privacy, with particular emphasis on statistical traffic analysis, Internet censorship circumvention and digital forensics.

This article was originally published on the Cheriton School of Computer Science website.

An international team of security researchers has received the prestigious 2024 Best Portuguese Internet Research Award from the Portuguese Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC.pt). The researchers were recognized for their paper, “Flow Correlation Attacks on Tor Onion Service Sessions with Sliding Subset Sum,” work that uncovered critical vulnerabilities in the Tor network.

The goal of the Tor network, one of the world’s most widely used anonymity networks, is to provide users a way to access the Internet as privately and anonymously as possible by routing encrypted traffic through multiple servers. Expectations are that this eliminates the possibility of tracing the origin of traffic, allowing Tor users to circumvent surveillance imposed by censorship agencies and national authorities.

Professor Diogo Barradas, from the Cheriton School of Computer Science, is among the paper’s co-authors. Their work was selected by the ISOC.pt because it exposed vulnerabilities in the Tor network that could be exploited by third parties to enable the tracking of presumed anonymous communications.

“The jury highlights the contribution of this paper to the protection of citizens’ rights online and against abusive surveillance and censorship on political or racial grounds, both goals of the Internet Society,” wrote Professor Hugo Miranda on behalf of the jury and ISOC.pt board. “The ISOC.pt congratulates Daniela Lopes, Jin-Dong Dong, Pedro Medeiros, Daniel Castro, Diogo Barradas, Bernardo Portela, João Vinagre, Bernardo Ferreira, Nicolas Christin and Nuno Santos for this work.”

About this award-winning research

Tor is a widely recognized low-latency anonymity network that allows users to circumvent surveillance, eavesdropping and censorship. Its ability to defend against flow correlation attacks is essential to provide strong anonymity guarantees. However, the feasibility of flow correlation attacks against Tor onion services has remained an open challenge.

In their award-winning paper, the researchers present an effective flow correlation attack that can deanonymize onion service sessions in the Tor network. Their attack is based on a novel distributed technique named Sliding Subset Sum (SUMo), which can be deployed by a group of colluding ISPs worldwide in a federated fashion. These ISPs collect Tor traffic at multiple vantage points in the network and analyze it through a pipelined architecture based on machine learning classifiers and a novel similarity function based on the classic subset sum decision problem. These classifiers enable SUMo to deanonymize onion service sessions effectively and efficiently. The researchers also analyzed possible countermeasures the Tor community can adopt to hinder the efficacy of these attacks.

Key contributions of the research

• A novel classification algorithm that enables efficient and accurate flow correlation for Tor onion service sessions
• Improved circuit fingerprinting classifiers, capable of by-passing the circuit padding defences implemented in the latest versions of Tor
• A robust classification pipeline, demonstrating the practical application and effectiveness of deploying SUMo attacks on Tor onion service sessions
• A large dataset for enabling flow correlation on Tor, encompassing both clearnet and onion service websites; this dataset represents a valuable resource for in-depth study and analysis of the Tor network
• A comprehensive evaluation of the described techniques, showing that SUMo attacks are feasible and effective

To learn more about the research on which this article is based, please see Daniela Lopes, Jin-Dong Dong, Pedro Medeiros, Daniel Castro, Diogo Barradas, Bernardo Portela, João Vinagre, Bernardo Ferreira, Nicolas Christin, Nuno Santos. Flow Correlation Attacks on Tor Onion Service Sessions with Sliding Subset Sum. Proceedings of the 31^st Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, San Diego, CA, USA.